On December 7, 1997 Bob Dylan received the Kennedy Center Honors Lifetime Achievement Award, which earned him the right to wear a tuxedo and sit in a balcony with Bill and Hillary Clinton (and, more importantly, Lauren Bacall) while watching others sing his praises.

The Kennedy Center Honors are a bit of a strange thing insofar as the recipients don’t give a speech and, when they’re musicians, don’t perform. They sit and nod and, in Dylan’s case, fidget an awful lot. There are cutaways to them looking on appreciatively while they are talked about, and you get to watch the president and the first lady gaze over at them appreciatively.

This was the second big meet-up of the Clintons with Dylan, who, of course, also sang at Bill’s first inauguration celebration. I actually don’t know if the president is involved at all in choosing these things (I doubt it), but it is the apt culmination of the Clinton administration on its last legs, honouring the voice of the sixties, even if Dylan shed that label a long time before.

Dylan was the last person to be honoured during the three hour show. The other nominees were the awesome Lauren Bacall, the horrible gun nut Charlton Heston, singer Jessye Norman, and dancer Edward Villella. Bit of a mixed bag.

Dylan was introduced by Gregory Peck. That is infinitely cooler than sitting with the president, I have to think. Peck misquotes the epic “Brownsville Girl” during the introduction, but the sentiment is a good one. They then play a pretty terrible video package that, of course, focuses almost entirely on Dylan’s output in the 1960s, which is probably not what he would have wanted, but that’s what you’re going to get.

You can watch a VHS dub of that whole part here – the sound is kind of out of synch though:

Three were three performances of Dylan songs that evening. The first is pretty predictable – Bruce Springsteen arrives on stage in a nice suit with a guitar and a harmonica rack and some genuinely nice words about “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. He then utterly and completely fucks up the moment by, I don’t even know, singing a parody of Dylan? It’s not a Springsteen performance and it is not a fitting tribute to Dylan at all, except perhaps to the Dylan who always shits the bed in the big televised spotlight. It’s really awful. Springsteen, by this time, had grabbed the role of the rock star who explains Dylan to the kids – he did it at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame too – but here he comes across as a jerk. Dylan, to his credit, sort of stares him down. Hillary, to her credit, does too. Watch her glare at the end of this video:

The Kennedy Center, unfortunately, has not posted the other two songs to YouTube, which is sad because apparently they were both much better. There is pretty much universal acclaim for the version of “Don’t Think Twice” that David Ball produced with the backing of longtime Dylan guitarist GE Smith. Apparently there is a shot of Bill Clinton joyfully singing along to this – singing it, in fact, to Hillary. Bill, it is not a love song. Well, the Clintons have always had a different kind of relationship.

The final song of the night was Shirley Caesar doing “Gotta Serve Somebody”. This isn’t on YouTube but it is on DailyMotion (which WordPress doesn’t get along with). You must click through this and watch her sing this song. Incredible. That is the way that you honour Bob Dylan – he’s the first to stand to give her a standing ovation. I hope Springsteen felt awful.

So, seventeen years ago – Bob Dylan officially proclaimed a living monument to Americana by the President of the United States.

I wasn’t going to even note this one, but then I saw that it was missing. The Best of Bob Dylan, that is.

Released in June 1997, this CD was only available in parts of the Commonwealth – the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I didn’t know that. It’s the type of thing that you see regularly in Canada when you flip through the Dylan CDs at a chain record store (when you can find one of those) and I had no idea that it wasn’t available in the US until I was looking at Dylan’s site and didn’t see it there. See for yourself:

Not there!

I’m not sure that there’s much to say about this album. It’s a greatest hits collection that covers most of the bases that you would expect a 72 minute greatest hits collection to cover. Sixteen songs cover 1963 to 1979, two take care of the next eighteen years. Re-examining the Dylan of the 1980s was apparently not yet fully in vogue.

The strangest selection on the CD is the inclusion of “Oh, Sister” as the selection from Desire. I’m not sure if that had appeared on any previous Dylan greatest hits collections, but it is certainly an outlier here. The best thing on it is probably the version of “Shelter from the Storm” that was used the previous year on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack.

Here’s a bit of that again:

Pretty terrible album cover, by the way. There are a thousand Dylan bootlegs that did a better job.

Bob Dylan made a career out of disappointing his fans by doing whatever he wanted. In 1997 he got the opportunity to disappoint the pope.

On September 27, 1997, three days before the release of Time Out of Mind, Dylan and his band performed three songs at the 23rd World Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, Italy in the presence of Pope John Paul II, who sat on a dais off to the side of the stage. It was a strange scene, with the pope and his entourage watching Dylan in his cowboy hat and western wear, and his touring band on stage (Bucky Baxter, still rocking that slide guitar!). This wasn’t part of a major Dylan tour – he had played the US that summer – rather it was a papal invitation. Dylan, being Dylan, tacked on a few shows in the UK on the way home.

The scene was more than a little bizarre. 300,000 young Catholics gathered to listen to the pope, who based at least part of his sermon on Dylan’s lyrics. Dylan performed two songs – “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (the title is apt, though probably not the lyrics generally) and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” before the pope spoke. You can see both of those songs here (the whole event aired on RAI UNO in Italy):

After Dylan met him, John Paul spoke to the crowd, basing at least  part of his sermon on Dylan’s lyrics:

A representative of yours has just said on your behalf that the answer to the questions of your life “is blowing in the wind”. It is true! But not in the wind which blows everything away in empty whirls, but the wind which is the breath and voice of the Spirit, a voice that calls and says: “come!” (cf. Jn 3:8; Rv 22:17).

You asked me: How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? I answer you: one! There is only one road for man and it is Christ, who said: “I am the way” (Jn 14:6). He is the road of truth, the way of life.
And, of course, speaking after the pope himself (tough act to follow), Dylan didn’t actually sing the requested and referenced song, instead closing the whole event with “Forever Young”. Sure, it’s got “May God bless and keep you always…” but Dylan certainly has written a lot of songs that would have been more appropriate. If you’re going to turn the request of the pope at a command performance, I mean that’s marching to your own drummer!

(According to Bjorner’s site, he didn’t even rehearse “Blowin’” at the soundcheck – though he did do “Maggie’s Farm” and “With God On Our Side”. What I wouldn’t give for a video of Bob Dylan singing “With God On Our Side” while the pope watched!)

Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, must have been at the sound check, because in his memoir of his predecessor he wrote that he didn’t want Dylan there. About the event:

The pope appeared tired, exhausted. At that very moment the stars arrived, Bob Dylan and others whose names I do not remember. They had a completely different message from the one which the pope had. There was reason to be skeptical I was, and in some ways I still am over whether it was really right to allow this type of ‘prophet’ to appear.

Wow. You probably have to live a pretty special life to play for one pope while another calls you a “prophet” with full-on scare quotes.

Here’s the video of Dylan actually meeting John Paul II (it isn’t included in the video up top). I wonder who was more impressed with the other? Actually, if you check at 5:34 of the video up top, you can tell that John Paul lacked enthusiasm for the whole thing.

I let 1996 Dylan slide a little bit because there wasn’t a lot going on except more and more and more of the Never Ending Tour. I thought about posting something about Dylan’s show at the 1996 Summer Olympic games in Atlanta but I couldn’t really find much to say about the show except for “Hey! Dylan! At the Olympics! Isn’t that sort of strange?”. A lot of that show is on YouTube, so you can check it out for yourself. Here he is doing “All Along the Watchtower”.

One of the fascinating things about Dylan at this point, now that I’m in 1997, is that things like another live version of “All Along the Watchtower” have become like white noise to me. I don’t actually skip the song if I’m listening to a live show, but I don’t actually listen to it either, if you know what I mean. It’s just sort of there.

One of the notable things about 1997 is that the show from April 7 (his only ever show in Fredericton, NB – so far) contained, as its third song. What was out of the ordinary was the fact that this was the one thousandth time that Dylan had performed this song live. 1,000 times. It sort of boggles my mind.

Actually, what is even more amazing is that, as of this writing, Dylan has now performed the song 2,243 times, including three times last week in Sydney.

If my counting is correct, there are seven songs that Dylan has performed live more than 1,000 times (in order):
All Along the Watchtower  2,243
Like a Rolling Stone  2,011
Highway 61 Revisited 1,783
Tangled Up in Blue  1,408
Ballad of a Thin Man  1,103
Blowin’ In the Wind  1,242
Maggie’s Farm 1,055

There are another half dozen that will cross that threshold this year or next at his current pace of touring.

I’ve listened to that 1,000th “Watchtower”. There’s nothing unusual about it at all. If Dylan knew if was his 1,000th (I highly doubt that he did), he did nothing to note that fact. It has the same sped up lyrical phrasing that he’d been singing for a while.

What is noteworthy is simply the sheer scope of what Dylan has done by this time as a touring act and, further, the fact that he would just continue to do it.

My favourite moment in the generally under-rated movie Funny People is when Seth Rogen asks James Taylor if he ever gets tired of singing the same songs over and over. I think I like that moment because that is exactly the question I’d like to ask. Don’t you just get bored of it? I feel like I would.

Dylan, of course, changes his songs so frequently and so dramatically that maybe it keeps him from getting tired of it all. He just keeps marching ever forward. Tonight, Fredericton. Tomorrow St. John. Then on to Bangor and Portland, Durham and Waltham. Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

Here’s an odd one. In 1996, a rare year in which no new Dylan album came out, he collaborated on two songs on a Dylanesque album by Gerry Goffin, Back Room Blood. Goffin, of course, was the songwriter who co-wrote fifty top forty hits, many with his first wife Carole King. These included “Will You Love Me Tomorrow”, “The Loco-Motion”, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, “Up On the Roof” and many, many others. He was one of the great rock songwriters, particularly when he worked with King. The two of them were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

Dylan worked with King a few times – she sang back-up on “Like a Rolling Stone” on the Letterman Tenth Anniversary show, and also sang back-up during some encores on a couple of his 1995 shows. The two clearly had a good relationship. With Goffin things seem a little more mysterious. Goffin, who passed away in June of this year, wasn’t known much as a performer. He recorded an album in 1973, and Back Room Blood was only his second ever. He wasn’t much of a singer – Dylan, even at his scratchiest, has a more melodious voice. But for whatever reason they decided to get together and put down a couple of songs.

“Masquerade”, apparently, was mostly written by Dylan in the mid-1980s around the time of Knocked Out Loaded. There is speculation that Goffin altered some of the lyrics, but the music is from Dylan’s tapes and he is credited as co-producer of the song.

“Tragedy of the Trade” was the more genuine collaboration, with Dylan approaching Goffin with a title and parts of the first verse. Goffin wrote the rest of the song and the music was written by Barry Goldberg when Dylan didn’t have time to work on it (perpetual touring and all). Dylan is credited with playing on the recording but that seems unlikely.

Neither of the songs strike me as offering much in the way of lyrics. “Tragedy of the Trade” is slightly better. It begins with a typically dark Dylan image of a young woman dead in the gutter, and then goes on from there. It’s a lament about the changing times:

The world’s been run with Backroom Blood
Long before the time of the flood
And it’s you who are betrayed
The tragedy of the trade

“Masquerade” name drops Ronald Reagan, which is something that Dylan seemed unlikely to do, and just sort of rambles. It’s easy to see why he might have given that one away.

Goffin isn’t a big enough name, apparently, to have people posting his music to YouTube for me to embed here. You can hear samples of both songs on places like AllMusic here.

Let’s send him out with something a little better than the Dylan collaboration. This is The Shirelles:

The first new Dylan music in a couple of years appeared in a venue so obscure that I don’t think I even knew it existed until yesterday. Dylan’s cover of the Johnny Cash hit “Ring of Fire” appeared on the soundtrack of the 1996 “romantic comedy” Feeling Minnesota. I put “romantic comedy” in scare quotes there because I’ve never seen the film, and since the wikipedia plot description begins with Cameron Diaz’s character being sold into sex slavery, well, colour me skeptical.

I’m not sure how or why the song is used in the film because I’m not going to watch a Keanu Reeves/Cameron Diaz film from twenty years ago to find out. Here is the trailer:

So, yeah, not watching that. I like how the voice over tells us it is a film “by Steven Baigelman” as if that should mean something. This was both the first film that he wrote and directed, so he wasn’t exactly a household name – and he hasn’t gone on to much acclaim either.

The trailer uses the Johnny Cash version of “Ring of Fire” rather than the Dylan one, so maybe they didn’t think Dylan was a selling point. The soundtrack doesn’t include the Cash version, so it is likely that it isn’t even in the film itself.

Dylan’s version here, you can hear it in this YouTube clip, is perfectly fine. “Ring of Fire” is so absolutely associated with Cash that it can seem almost pointless to bother covering it; everything is liable to feel thin in comparison. There’s nothing wrong with this version at all, but neither is particularly new or noteworthy. I guess I like the drumming here, but not the back-up singers.

Dylan had recorded “Ring of Fire” once before, in 1969 in sessions with Cash that led to the inclusion of “Girl From the North Country” on Nashville Skyline. That version, with Dylan’s crooner voice, trades phrases with Cash and is more interesting for the duet, although the band is so totally doing the Cash guitar work that is almost distracting.

This is it for new Dylan songs for this week, so you’d better enjoy this while you have a chance!

As I’ve already mentioned, 1995 was an epic year for the touring Bob Dylan – 116 shows in five distinct tours. I have absolutely no ability to sort out that sort of volume of material (though every single show is out there as a bootleg if you actually wanted to try to bring order to it all). There are certain sites that I use as signposts – Bjorner and Bob’s Boots are both very opinionated and will signal some excellent material – but, of course, that requires a certain outsourcing of my own critical judgments. I wish this wasn’t so, but the fact remains that there aren’t enough hours in the day to do this kind of thing in a single week.

Dylan fans have done remarkable work in terms of making his tours available. Probably every single show after 1974 is available in full somewhere. Better, are some of the curated bootlegs. One of the greatest, for example, is Jewels and Binoculars, which lovingly collects every single recording from 1966 – radio interviews, the Denver Hotel tapes, and live performances from the US, Australia, and Europe (including the fateful UK tour) – into a single 26 CD box set. The thing is astonishing, and you can listen to the entire output of a year like 1966 in a single week.

A similar 1995 set would probably run to about 180 CDs as a guess – a lot of his concerts ran about a CD and a half in length. Thankfully some kind souls have gathered greatest hits packages. One that I benefited from this week was the 5 CD European Tour Anthology. This offers a single complete show (Prague) and then fills it in with the best versions of a lot of songs from that tour, or with the one-offs. Even this captures only the best parts of one of his five tours that year, but it is still a huge headstart.

I have to say, I quite love this 5 CD set. I enjoyed live Dylan in 1995 more than I’ve liked live Dylan since about 1980. I know that this isn’t widely regarded as the peak of the Never Ending Tour, but I thought that there were a ton of great performances throughout the year. That said, I’m less attracted to entire shows. Bjorner particularly singles out the Philadelphia shows of June 21 and 22 as among the best ever from the NET, but I don’t hear it. Yes, they’re good, but, for me, no better than the London shows, or the Prague show. It is true that Dylan works a lot better in 1995 in smaller venues (Philadelphia was in the Theater of the Living Arts – an 800 person venue; London was at the Brixton Academy). Venues that don’t require the band to try to fill in all that space. Basically, I like the 1995 Dylan when you can follow the slide guitar playing of Bucky Baxter.

The other way to approach such a major body of touring material is to highlight the one-offs. Dueting with the Rolling Stones, for example, even when it’s not good. On the first European tour Elvis Costello opened for Dylan on a number of nights, and he also joined him onstage during a few encores (March 30, and March 31 with Carole King and Chrissie Hynde). These break up the routine of the shows, and give something new to focus on. Here’s Dylan and Costello doing “I Shall Be Released”.

To my ear the even better collaboration came at the end of the year. Dylan normally ended his touring year at Thanksgiving, but for whatever reason in 1995 he did a ten date tour in December with Patti Smith as the opening act. Dylan requested that Smith tour with him, then didn’t even bother to meet her for the first three shows. The last seven, however, contain duets during the acoustic portion of the Dylan set, with Smith joining him on “Dark Eyes”, a completely under-rated mid-1980s song from Empire Burlesque. Here they are from the Beacon Theatre in New York. I would’ve loved to have been at this show.

Dylan will “only” do three tours and 83 shows in 1996 (US, Europe, US). Same band for most of the tour (they change drummers after the European leg). I’ll probably write mostly the same post again next week, but instead of Elvis and Patti you get guest stars like Jewel and Aimee Mann. Times change.

In 1995 Bob Dylan played a remarkable, astounding 116 concerts. This topped even 1978 for his most prolific year on the road. He did five distinct tours, and even a couple of, I don’t know, sub-tours? within them. For instance, in June he played as the opening act for five Grateful Dead shows at big arenas on the east coast. He didn’t appear onstage with them – I guess everyone had already figured out that that was a bad idea. More interestingly, on July 27 Dylan opened for The Rolling Stones in Montpellier, France.

This was Dylan’s shortest concert of the year – just nine songs and about an hour long. It is more rock and roll than many of his other shows of the year. I haven’t listened to enough of his shows to say that it was among his worst, but it is certainly not among his best (about which more in a couple of days). I think my enjoyment is at least somewhat hampered by a bootleg where the audience never shuts up – they were clearly there to see the Stones.

About whom. Dylan has interacted with the members of the Stones frequently during the course of this blog. Ron Wood, obviously the most, but also Keith Richards (Live Aid most memorably) and Mick Taylor for an extended period of time as his lead guitarist in the 1980s. Dylan had far less (public) contact with Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts, at least as far as I have noted.

The public collision of the two-1960s forces was, of course, inevitable. The Stones, well known for their covers, probably had to eventually cover “Like A Rolling Stone”, even if it wouldn’t be good. In 1995 they were on one of their many comeback tours, the Voodoo Lounge Tour (which actually began in 1994 but was still going by summer 1995). At the time it was the highest grossing tour in music history (it has subsequently lost that record many times over, including once to themselves). They did 129 shows in 13 months, which is a Dylan-esque pace!

So, in Montpellier the two acts came together. Partly this seems to have been so that they could record a music video. The Stones released an album, Stripped, that included live songs from the tour as well as some new versions of their back catalogue. The album included a cover of Dylan’s song. This was mostly a waste of time. It seems like it is going to be a good idea, but the version is almost totally forgettable. The best thing about it, by far, was the (at the time) highly unusual camera work in the music video (starring Patricia Arquette!), although even that falls into the “seen it once, seen it a thousand times” category.

At the show in Montpellier, Dylan returned to the stage after his short opening set to perform “Like A Rolling Stone” with Jagger and the boys. Jagger and Dylan alternate verses on the song. As is so often the case whenever anyone sings with Dylan, it just doesn’t work out. It is all a bit of a muddle. The best part is Jagger’s French in the introduction, after that it is all downhill.

I don’t have any video of this performance. You can wait a couple of weeks – in 1998 Dylan will open for the Stones again during their tour of South America and there’s video of this duet at that time. Warning: Do not get your hopes up.

To give the Stones some credit, they do the aging rock star thing better than Dylan does. Dylan’s best 1995 shows are the ones where he’s in a smaller venue, and where he is doing the country thing. I think he has some unbelievably great shows in 1995.  But the big stadiums, and the full rock and roll sound generally eludes him. The Stones might have been a fraction of what they were at their peak, but in some moments they can still go.

This one is incredible.

“Happy Birthday, Mr. Frank”, Bob Dylan says to Sinatra on the occasion of the older man’s 80th birthday.

At a star-studded evening superstars like Little Richard, Bruce Springsteen, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett and Bono came to serenade the great one with a selection of the songs that he made famous. Dylan was supposed to play “That’s Life”, which might have been great, but when he got there, the story goes, Sinatra himself requested “Restless Farewell”, the closing track from The Times The Are A-Changin’. Dylan had never performed this song in concert before (the only other known performance of it other than the album take was on the Canadian TV show Quest thirty-two years earlier). Backed by his touring band and a string quartet, Dylan absolutely crushes this one. It’s a beautiful version, and the only non-Sinatra song performed that night. Watch it here.

Dylan has a persona that seems like it could hardly be more removed from that of Sinatra. They are polar opposites in so many important ways: voice, repertoire, compositionally. The quarter century that separates them in age seems particularly enormous given the rapid transformation of popular music in the 1960s. Nonetheless, Dylan is clearly a fan. So much of Sinatra’s appeal lies not in his voice, but in his phrasing, and so too with Dylan. When Dylan released a Sinatra cover on his website earlier this year (rumoured to be a tease for his new album), some people were surprised, but they need not be. Dylan grew up listening to an enormous range of music, and Sinatra was obviously a key part of that. Bjorner notes that only four singers were invited by Sinatra to his house after the show: Stever Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Springsteen and Dylan. What a group that must have been.

At the end of the show, the entire ensemble sang “New York, New York”, with Sinatra joining for the final few notes. It was his last performance on stage, and he passed away a few years later in 1998. I’ve always been fascinated by Sinatra, and I find him all the more fascinating for the fact that of all the singers in the world to request a song from, he’d choose Dylan, and of all the songs, he’d choose one of the most obscure of his entire oeuvre. But, after all, the final phrase:

So I’ll make my stand

And remain as I am

And bid farewell and not give a damn

is probably as close as folk ever came to “My Way”.

This week probably won’t have a lot of Dylan posts, because, although he was quite busy with touring (five distinct tours: Europe in March and April; US in May and June; Europe in July; US from September to November; and a tour with Patti Smith in December), there isn’t as much material that I can share with readers, since a lot of this isn’t online. I’m sure I can dig up something.

A quick note, though, that I am listening to Dylan’s March 31 show at the Brixton Academy in London (part of a three night residency, and good shows they are) when, during “I Don’t Believe You” there is the intrusion of crowd noise. That’s par for the course on bootlegs, but this was really clear dialogue. As I paid attention to it, I was amused by the fact that it was an usher or security guard yelling at the bootlegger, or someone close to him, that he had to take the camera away and put it in his car. There is a long discussion about this, and the security person assures the camera owner that he can come back in, but he must get the camera out of there. It’s all quite hilarious knowing that they’ve missed out on the larger infraction that is happening right in that very spot.

Takes away from a nice version of the song, though.

Oops! Here’s another camera, capturing “Joey” from that same show!